CHAMPAIGN — Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Illinois men’s basketball’s run to the 2005 national championship game during the college basketball season was always going to be a non-starter.
That team might have put the country on notice from mid-November through the first week of April, winning 37 games and coming up just a few plays short of a perfect season, but getting them all back in Champaign in that same stretch this past season wasn’t going to work.
Too many of them still had basketball responsibilities of their own.
James Augustine was the last man standing as a player, having wrapped up his career during the 2017-18 season with Unicaja in Spain’s top league. And while former Illinois coach Bruce Weber is a regular as a Big Ten Network studio analyst, it’s the four former players that are now coaches themselves that made an in-season anniversary essentially impossible to put together.
It’s why the 20th anniversary and reunion was pushed to the last weekend in August when most of the players, coaches and staff from that team returned to Champaign to celebrate one of the best seasons in program history.
Before practices and training camps started ahead of the 2025-26 basketball seasons. Because that’s when guys like Dee Brown, Roger Powell Jr., Brian Randle and Rich McBride would be unavailable all over again. Their full attention would rightly be on their own teams. That so many would wind up in coaching wasn’t something they would have thought of 20 years ago when they were still playing together.
“We had a lot of guys with very high basketball IQ, a lot of passion for the game, a passion for growing the game and a passion for people,” said McBride, who is entering his third season as an assistant at Eastern Illinois and has had stops at nearly every level of basketball in the last decade. “I could definitely see it now, for sure.”
Weber said so many of his former players winding up in coaching is something he regularly thinks about. Another recent reunion with his Southern Illinois team that reached the Sweet 16 in 2002 included several more coaches. That group included current Southeast Missouri State coach Brad Korn, East Tennessee State assistant coach Marcus Belcher and DeSmet Jesuit coach Kent Williams.
“I think it had something to do with success when they love the game and they care about it and they learn it,” Weber said about his former players turned coaches.
Both Brown and Powell are leading their own programs. Brown is in his fourth season at Roosevelt University and has guided the Lakers in their move from NAIA to NCAA Division II. Powell is entering his third season at Valparaiso, where his coaching career began as an assistant for Bryce Drew in 2011.
“For me, it was a calling,” Powell said about his shift to coaching. “I was playing professional, and at 28, I was in my prime and felt like I was called to come back and impact young men. It was a passion of developing young men. It’s pretty cool being a coach. I get to pull from all the coaches I played for and I get to pull from all the experiences I had being a player — especially here.
“Bruce did such a good job of teaching, and he did such a good job of allowing us to be ourselves. That’s something I think I’ve taken into my coaching philosophy.”
Weber said Brown told him he turned the All-American guard into “a basketball junkie.” While Brown played nearly a decade professionally both in the NBA and around the world, he was keeping notebooks during his time in Champaign for when he would become a coach. Jotting down what he liked — and what he didn’t — from Bill Self, Weber, all of the Illinois assistants and his coaches in places like Israel, Italy, China and Turkey during his playing career.
“Jay Price used to run me to death in the morning,” Brown said of the former Illini assistant. “I took a lot of what those guys instilled in us. Our coaching was magnificent. We were always prepared for games, and that came from coaching.
“During our championship run my sophomore and junior years, we won a lot of close games and a lot of big games by preparation. That had a lot to do with the coaching staff and how they prepared us and how we went about our business.”
Randle experienced the same even if his coaching journey led him not back to college basketball but to the NBA. The Peoria native got his start in the league during the 2018-19 season as an assistant video coordinator for the Minnesota Timberwolves before getting a player development role the next season. He’s back with the Phoenix Suns as an assistant heading into the 2025-26 season after an initial three-year stint with the organization from 2020-23 and one-year stops with the Detroit Pistons and Washington Wizards.
“To see all these guys as coaches being successful, it’s unique,” Randle said. “I know (the Illinois coaches) demanded a lot of a lot of people, but this team, we all stood tall. Something just rubbed off. They gave us something. Hard work, resilience and passion, I guess in life and in basketball —wherever it took us — and it led some of us to coaching.”
Weber is adamant how well the 2004-05 Illini team understood the game is the reason Brown, Powell, Randle and McBride became coaches. And why several more could have if they wanted to, including Deron Williams.
“He said I worked too hard and he didn’t want to be a coach and do what I had to do,” Weber said of Williams, who played 12 seasons in the NBA with a short stint in Turkey during the 2011 NBA lockout.
“Obviously, he made a little money, so he didn’t have to worry about it and have all that stress,” Weber continued. “It’s a group that understood the game of basketball. Not only were they talented and played together, but they understood the game. That’s what really made them special.”